The Day the Uptime Died

Newsgroups	comp.unix.solaris, comp.os.unix, alt.slack
From	Tom Mix <tommix@dev.null>
Subject	The Day the Uptime Died
Followup-To	comp.unix.solaris
Organization	Order of the Eternal Bait
Message-ID	<slrn10fqscb.j20h.tommix@devnull.org> (permalink)
Date	2025-10-26 00:55 +0000

Cross-posted to 3 groups.

Followups directed to: comp.unix.solaris

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We had this ancient SunFire V440 that had been quietly running an internal
license daemon since the Bush administration. Nobody dared touch it. It
wasn’t in the inventory, wasn’t in monitoring, and nobody had a password we
were sure still worked. It just sat there in the corner, fans humming like a
Zen monk, serving licenses and judgment in equal measure.

Then one day, Facilities decided to move racks for “airflow optimization.”
They pulled the plug without asking anyone. When I saw it offline, my blood
went cold. That box had an uptime older than some of the new hires.

We plugged it back in, hit power, and the console lit up with hieroglyphs —
firmware banner from 2004, date in another century. The POST took five
minutes, then it stopped dead with a cheerful message:

WARNING: NVRAM checksum invalid. Restoring factory defaults.

At that moment, I knew this was going to be a séance, not a reboot. The
boot PROM had lost all its environment variables — no boot-device, no
diag-switch, nothing. It just sat there, blinking at me, waiting for a
manual boot command like it was 1999.

We had to hunt down an old Solaris 9 CD and use an external USB CD-ROM —
which, of course, didn’t work without a firmware update. That’s how I ended
up flashing a system older than my laptop battery just to make it see a
drive.

Eventually, it booted. License server came back like nothing happened. I
didn’t cheer. I just stared at it, then whispered, “Don’t you ever do that
again.”

Management said, “Make sure this never happens again.”
I said, “Sure. Step one: Don’t move racks with archaeology still in them.”

-- 
Tom Mix

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The Day the Uptime Died Tom Mix <tommix@dev.null> - 2025-10-26 00:55 +0000
  Re: The Day the Uptime Died The Wizard of Izz <horchata12839@gmail.com> - 2025-10-25 20:39 -0500
  Re: The Day the Uptime Died Marco Moock <mm+solani@dorfdsl.de> - 2025-10-26 09:58 +0100
    Re: The Day the Uptime Died Tom Mix <tommix@dev.null> - 2025-10-26 12:02 +0000
      Re: The Day the Uptime Died Winston <wbe@UBEBLOCK.psr.com.invalid> - 2025-10-26 08:26 -0400
  Re: The Day the Uptime Died Winston <wbe@UBEBLOCK.psr.com.invalid> - 2025-10-26 08:13 -0400

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